Cartoon Canon: Five goals five ways!

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Penguins have always fared pretty well on New Year’s Eve, and in some important games.

As recently as 2015, they crawled out of a two-goal hole to rout the Red Wings, 5-2, showing the first signs of life in quite some time and illustrating that maybe, just maybe, this Mike Sullivan guy knew what he was doing. You couldn’t call it the game that turned their season around, exactly, but the fight the Penguins showed that night was definitely a stepping-stone for what was to come that June.

But nothing we’ve seen, or will ever see again, compares to Mario Lemieux’s momentous, spectacular five goals/five ways feat 30 years ago on the last day of 1988. It really was the iconic Mario moment, whose flair for the dramatic nearly equaled his unparalleled athleticism. Many players in the history of the league have scored five goals in a game … but none of them could, or will ever, do it with the panache of Le Magnifique!